Ron Suskind on Bush's Dysfunctional Presidency

Ron Suskind has written a book on the Bush Administration called, The One Per Cent Doctrine. I suppose if Suskind had been in a sarcastic mood, he might have named the book, The Managing of the Junior Bush and Cheney's Paranoia Unbound. Everything we've been hearing in the last few days simply fills in the details of what we already know of the Bush era. There have been reviews already of Suskind's book and there will be more. Here's some excerpts from Michiko Kakutani's review in The New York Times:

The book, which focuses on the 2001 to 2004 period, not only sheds new light on the Bush White House's strategic thinking and its doctrine of pre-emptive action, but also underscores the roles that personality and ideology played in shaping the administration's decision to go to war in Iraq. It describes how poorly prepared homeland security was (and is) for another terrorist attack, and looks at a series of episodes in the war on terror that often found the "invisibles," who run intelligence and enforcement operations on the ground, at odds with the "notables," who head the government.

In fleshing out key relationships among administration members — most notably, between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush, Mr. Bush and Mr. Tenet, and Mr. Tenet and Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser — it adds some big, revealing chunks to the evolving jigsaw-puzzle portrait of this White House and its modus operandi, while also giving the reader some up close and personal looks at the government's day-to-day operations in the war on terror.

(snip)

Just as disturbing as Al Qaeda's plans and capabilities are the descriptions of the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror and its willful determination to go to war against Iraq. That war, according to the author's sources who attended National Security Council briefings in 2002, was primarily waged "to make an example" of Saddam Hussein, to "create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States."

(snip)

This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in "The Price of Loyalty" and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In "The One Percent Doctrine," he writes that Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation.

We have a powerful official, Cheney, who knows how to push and pull the levers of power but who has an arrogant, paranoid and reckless judgment that would drive almost any country in the world into the ground (a large powerful country being about the only type of country that can absorb such damage); and we have his boss, George W. Bush, who is supposedly in charge, has the authority to check someone like Cheney, but who is too incurious and too focused on protecting his own image to notice his own failed presidency. It is good that the American people are catching on.

But Gloria Borger of US News wonders if the Republicans understand the enormity yet of the Bush meltdown:

Today's political realities are much more complex than any particular pandering. There's an unpopular president, plus an unpopular war (despite the good news that Abu Musab Zarqawi bought it last week), high gas prices, and low public confidence in the state of the nation. To think that a few days spent debating gay marriage will make anyone suddenly eager to vote is unrealistic, even silly. But it does underscore one reality: Republicans are at least starting to understand the gravity of their political predicament. "We're about five months behind schedule," says one top GOP strategist. "But at least we're starting to face up to what's ahead of us."

...So what's ahead for the rest of us? A midterm election, it seems, in which each party will operate in a parallel universe: That is, the Democrats will try to nationalize the election as a referendum on the president; the Republicans will instead try to localize each race. "If it's a referendum on the president, we lose," one top House Republican tells me. "We have to make sure we run good local races, and then we'll survive. Which is all we can ask for."

Republican politicians are worried about their survival? Is that the message Congressional Republicans want to send to our soldiers in Iraq? To the American people? Does the Republican leadership have any comprehension of their responsibilities yet? Such as, the need to fix a broken presidency? To fix a broken foreign policy? The list is getting long of the number of things Bush and Cheney have broken that need to be fixed.

I don't know what's going to happen this fall, but if the American people don't send people to Washington who will hold Bush accountable and start fixing things, we're in for two more years of national drift at a time when the rest of the world is taking advantage of the fact that we're tied down in Iraq; in case anyone hasn't noticed, we're living in a time of very rapid change.